with love to indore

Saturday, December 20, 2014

1. A single person IDA CEO since long
2. IDA simply not interested in making low cost housing
3. IPS daughter of a retired IAS, ex VC of university, MP gets plot in quota of SC people. Such a mockery of reservation rules meant for benefit of SC people
4.almost all councillors or their relatives are road contractors.it is such a cosy arrangement.
5.Indore's local govt has fetish for paver blocks. all roads & footpaths being laid with it to make money in construction
6. huge violation of environmental norms close to 20-13% area of zoo, gardens in indore full of cement,blocks & construction
7. no way to track attendance of sanitation staff.all cleaning staff gives money to politicians/officials & rampant absenteeism
8.no enquiry yet into death of white tiger cubs after family of mayor given access to them before even their mother flouting all norms
9. Rebate in property tax being used to benefit dishonest tax payers as permanent measure
10. tax inspectors of Indore municipal corporation making crores by simply winking at tax evasion
11. building inspectors again making moolah by not reporting on constructions flouting municipal rules
12. huge number of trees being cut & no new plantation
13. a cabal of 10-12 officers working since last 15 years. all would have become multimillionairs by now

Monday, November 3, 2014

The state of Madhya Pradesh (MP) was formed on November 1st,
1956 and completes 58 years of its existence this week. Despite being
the largest state in the country for 44 years, until Chhatisgarh was
carved out, the visible connection of Madhya Pradesh with national
politics and general discourse has been limited. Only in the last
decade, the state has been increasingly talked about at the national
level, primarily driven by rapid economic growth – most of which comes
from the strides made in the agricultural sector.

Friday, October 24, 2014

The recent PMTscam in MP, corruption in MCI & continued migration of medical students to abroad for MBBS points to yawning demand supply gap between availaibiltiy of medical seats & demand

Private sector has been allowed in but due to requirement of having a hospital & trained doctors to teach, not many colleges have been openend. On the other hand government is short of funds to invest in opening new colleges

Existing government hospitals( which see large number of in &out patinets & have huge land bank, not to mention qualified medical practitioner on roll) can be converted to medical colleges in a PPP mode. An indicative plan is thus

1. Building - existing hospital building to be used, if needed one block/floor can be added as class rooms2. Faculty - Government doctors already on roll.Private partner can employ more doctors ( which will be paidby him) government doctors also to be paid by private party for teaching duties they undertake. Private doctors will have to attend patients as & when need be. Modalities for sharing of these doctors can be worked upon.3. Hospital Infra- existing infra to be used. To upgrade it upto MCI standards, private party to make fixed investment. This will be fixed componenet of bid4. Hostel - If land available with hospital to be used for construction of hostel to be done by private party. Else government to allot pvt party land on which it will build hostel. Hostel to be run on no profit /no loss basis where students given admission on government seat to be charged reasonable tarriff5. Medical seats - Half of theseats to be filled in by government entrance exam and to be priced like any other government medical college. Other half to be management quota seats , which private party will be allowed to fill as per government norm prevalent for management quota seats6. Equipments & consumables - Equipment& consumables required for medical education to be bought by private party.

In Indore district alone Jila aspatal situated on dhar road & Madhya bharat hospital in Mhow can be easily converted to medical colleges in this PPP mode.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

As many as 11,441 appeals and complaints under Right to Information Act are pending with the Madhya Pradesh Information Commission which is currently functioning without a chief and other commissioners.

A total of 9,946 appeals and 1,495 complaints are pending against various state government departments for failing to give desired information sought by applicants under the transparency legislation, according to documents, updated till September 2012, accessed under RTI by an activist, Ajay Dubey.

The Madhya Pradesh Information Commission is working without a Chief and other Commissioners apparently due to lack of guidance from the Centre on a Supreme Court judgement which said that only retire judges can be appointed in the transparency panel.

The apex court has further said that a two-member bench, comprising a member from legal background, can hear appeals pending with the Commission.

All eleven posts -- one Chief Information Commissioner and ten Information Commissioners -- are vacant in the Information Commission and it has stopped hearing any matters since September 13 last year.

According to the documents received by Dubey, the Madhya Pradesh Government has sought direction from Personnel Ministry in this regard.

The RTI activist said, "The state government is delaying the appointment of Chief Information Commissioner and other Information Commissioners in the State Information Commission by citing legal issues. The Centre has already said that appeals and complaints can be resolved without having members as retired judges."

Dubey said that Right to Know should be a basis for voting. "If citizens right to know are being clamped, they should not vote that government also," he said.

The RTI Act 2005 mandates disclosure of information related to all matters of governance. As per the Act, there has to be a Chief Information Commissioner and a maximum of ten information commissioners.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

ndore, because of its location, had a rich tradition of lakes. Rain water was harvested and stored in structures, which recharged groundwater. Then, in 1977, the city brought Narmada water from some 110 km to the city. Indore should have had enough to drink and to swim. But 35 years later, the water has still not reached all distribution pipelines. Over 50 per cent of the 172 million litres per day of water it sources is lost in distribution, which means there is far more costs but far less water to supply. The city water utility has no money to repair and extend its water system. It spends all it has and more in just electricity costs of bringing the water. Politicians are vying with each other to bring the water from the Maheshwar dam. The recent jal samadhi by the Maheshwar dam-displaced has met with enormous anger from Indore’s power elite. They say they need the dam’s water at all costs. They do not care if the people, whose land has been submerged by the dam, have not received compensation or been resettled.

The same power elite never demand systems to deal with the sewage they flush out of their homes. In Indore, the sewage system was constructed in 1936 at the time of the Holkars. Independent Indore has added to it insignificantly. The bulk of the sewage pours into its rivers, Khan and Saraswati, and Piliyakhal Nullah, untreated. It forgets that the Khan pollutes the Kshipra; the main water source of the neighbour, Ujjain.

For instance, they should not repeat the mistake of allowing fleets of cars to take over their roads. Indore was an enlightened city to plan for a bus-based future. Some years ago it invested in new buses, rationalised routes, created systems for efficient operation and put GPS in place to track and inform customers. Now cost of bus fuel is up, fares have not been revised and buses are losers. Still the majority of the city population rides or walks, even though the city’s footpaths are long gone. Indore is now building a bus rapid transit (BRT) corridor. It has a many foreign and Indian consultants to design the system but the people of Indore have no idea what is being proposed and why BRT is important. So they already hate it.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Madhya Pradesh stands out as the best model of implementing gutka ban. This is the result of administrative will coupled with political and public action

The implementation of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) notification 2011 that effectively prohibits the production, sale, and consumption of gutka products containing tobacco and nicotine is one of the landmark public health interventions in Madhya Pradesh in recent years. In a country where 90% oral cancers are directly related to use of smokeless tobacco, the State-level intervention that Madhya Pradesh has initiated is of high importance for two apparent reasons. First, this has undone the previous history (also the myth, of an impractical ban!) of 2001 that failed to sustain the ban due to various pressures including that of judiciary and industrial lobbies. Secondly, the current move has provided momentum to the action against gutka and pan masala all over the country. , After Madhya Pradesh imposed gutka ban, Kerala, Bihar, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Haryana followed suit.

The health challenges of the gutka products have long been a concern for public health activists and people. In India, the consumption of gutka is widespread and this outnumbers any other form of tobacco use. As per the Global Adult Tobacco Survey India 2010, 75% of the current 275 million tobacco users consume gutka. Because of easy availability, low prices and the attractive marketing, gutka products have gained popularity among schoolgoing children and adolescents over the years. As per the Global Youth Tobacco Survey India Report, 2006 the use of gutka is 10% among the boys and 5.5% among girls of schoolgoing age. The National Institute of Health & Family Welfare in its fact-finding report mentions of 3,028 chemical ingredients in gutka products. Of these, 28 chemical ingredients are proven carcinogens! As per the study of Indian Council of Medical Research, 70,261 people were detected with cancer of the mouth, tongue and hypo pharynx in 2010 because of “smokeless tobacco products.” The numbers of those affected have been steadily rising from 2008.

Madhya Pradesh stands out as the best model of implementing gutka ban and this is importantly, the result of administrative will coupled with political and public action. The need for enforcement primarily originated from the high levels of gutka consumption in the State. The State developed an initial plan of action under the leadership of the then Food Commissioner, and implemented the plan rigorously by ensuring the support of district administrations, the general public and the media. As of July 2012, approximately 50 raids were conducted and four million pouches confiscated.

The implementation has evidently succeeded to curtail both the supply and the demand for gutka in the State. The enforcement of ban is widely discussed and appreciated en masse. Now, rampant use is reduced. Access is considerably reduced for casual users, children and women. Retailers had a loss of 50% turnover in the last four months after the ban and most importantly all the 16 registered factories were sealed to close. Certainly, blackmarketing exists through cross-border smuggling but the wide reach of the supply chain is shattered by the ban and subsequent administrative actions.

However, one of the major drawbacks is the lack of adequate cessation facilities in the State. In the absence of such facilities, gutka users may switch to other products that are cheap but equally harmful.

However, what is important now is to sustain the fight through continuous monitoring of implementation systems with coordinated inter-State/district activities. Further to this, the experience of Madhya Pradesh and other States should inform the National Tobacco Control Programme of India in order to extend the best practices across the country. This would surely provide a great leap forward to the tobacco control initiatives.

(Liju Ramachandran (alohiram@gmail.com) is a Public Health Researcher with Voluntary Health Association of India,

Sunday, September 2, 2012

When geologist Arun Sonakia accidentally discovered South Asia’s first ancient human remains at a place called Hathnora in the Narmada Valley one winter 30 years ago, the region came under the trowels and maps of archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists worldwide.

Three decades on, Indian and international scientists have turned up treasures that are slowly adding pieces to the puzzle—how and when did early humans come here, what were they like, and what other creatures did they share these lands with?

No other ancient fossil has been dug up yet, at least not one that can be definitively identified as a specific early human species, but scores of what appear to be stone tools used by these missing people have certainly begun to tell us more about them, as have the animal fossils, which range from bones of an almost complete Stegodon, the modern elephants’ extinct cousin, to ancient wild-dogs and wild-boars, cousins of the modern horse, hippopotamuses and ostrich eggshells.

The stone tools are as old as 800,000 years and as young as 10,000 years, spanning a large swathe of the stone-age. While some believe modern homo sapiens entered the Indian sub-continent from Africa through West Asia between 70,000 to 50,000 years ago, the archaeological site at Attirampakkam, near Chennai, is believed to be between 1.07 and 1.5 million years old and was possibly home to the pre-modern species, homo erectus.

So what happened in the hundreds of thousands of years that fall between these time-lines—who lived in the landmass between these regions, and was the Deccan region a passage from north to south?

As of now, archaeologists agree they need to dig deeper and wider in the Narmada Valley, and a team has been formed to do that, involving experts from the Stone Age Institute in the US, M S University in Vadodara, and Panjab University in Chandigarh and the Deccan College in Pune.

“In India, we do not know when modern human groups first arrived, how many dispersals there were and if they inter-bred with the pre-existing hominin groups in the region. We don’t even know if there were any other hominin species in India when modern humans arrived there. But it is also possible that within the last two million years, India was home to one or more unknown hominin species, fossils of which we have not yet discovered,” said Parth Chauhan, a researcher with the Stone Age Institute and Department of Anthropology (Indiana University) in Indiana, USA, who presented some recent findings at the IIT-Gandhinagar this week.

Chauhan was one of eight scientists to co-author a 2009 paper in the Journal of Human Evolution that listed a wide array of discoveries such as stone blades, flakes, choppers, hand-axes, picks, cleavers, micro-fossils and other fossil teeth and bones. Over two years of combing the Narmada Valley, the team found stone tools in ten places. Considering the mixed nature of archaeological and fossil material dated from the deposits, the team’s preliminary analysis suggests the “Narmada man” may be much younger than 250,000 years as earlier believed, maybe between 160,000 years and 50,000 years old.

Meanwhile, findings at another site called Dhansi, about three kilometres south of Hathnora and separated by the Narmada River, have been significant. No Acheulian elements have been found there so far, and whatever stone artifacts have been found there are simple flakes, cores and a chopper. These resemble those of Oldowan, the earliest of all stone tool technologies—existence of which has never been “properly proven” in South Asia. Based on the previously-dated age of the sediments here, the artifacts are at least 780,000 years old but require further scientific verification, the researchers say.

Until younger implements are found, the present lot seems to suggest non-modern humans indeed lived there as long as two million years back. Tentative archaeological evidence from northern Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s also suggests this.

Monday, July 30, 2012

this is olympic season and indian hockey team well in its first match against netherlands

shivendra singh of gwalior is part of indian team and scored a oal today so i thought to make a post about Shankar Lakshman who captained Indian team in 1964 tokyo olympic old

Ask any Indian hockey lover to name the greatest Indian to grace the hockey field, and I am sure, their answers would be confined to the Dhyan Chands and the Dhanraj Pillays. Shankar Laxman is a name hardly talked about when people sit and disc

y in the late 50s and early 60s might say that Shankar Laxman was arguably the greatest goalkeeper to have ever played for India.

Born in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh, Shankar Laxman started his sports career as a footballer, and it was only after he joined the army, that he switched over to hockey. Playing for Services, he immediately earned admirers due to his fearless and assured goalkeeping.

Shankar Laxman was part of India’s three successful Olympics campaigns where he won two golds – 1956 (Melbourne) and ’64 (Tokyo) to go along with a silver in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, where India lost out to Pakistan in the final.

His biggest moment of glory came in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics where India met Pakistan in the third consecutive Olympics final. The match was called a thriller even before it began and it did not disappoint. After India took the lead early in the second half, Pakistan, wanting to prove that their win in Rome four years ago wasn’t a fluke, went all-out with their attack. But that day, Laxman had a match of his life. Despite the lack of protective gear, he blunted Pakistan’s attacks with valiant goalkeeping and helped India regain the gold medal.

After the final, the manager of the silver medal winning Pakistani hockey team called Laxman “The Rock of Gibraltar”, as he was the sole obstacle between the Pakistani team and the gold medal. Hockey Circle, an Australian Hockey Magazine, referring to Laxman’s performance in the final quoted,

“…for Laxman, the ball was the size of a football. It was his afternoon of glory and fame.”

He also represented India in three Asian games starting in 1958 when hockey was first introduced in the Asiad in Tokyo, where India won the gold. The 1962 games in Jakarta was a disappointing tournament for him as India lost to Pakistan in the final and he was made the scapegoat for the loss. But he came back to captain India to a gold medal at the Bangkok games.

You just have to take a look at his stunning record to know how brilliant a goalkeeper he was. In three Olympic finals against Pakistan, he conceded just one goal and in three Asian Games finals, he conceded two.

But despite a superb effort of conceding just 3 goals in 6 finals, Laxman was given a raw deal by the Indian Hockey Federation when he was dropped from the squad for 1968 Mexico Olympics.

Dhyan Chand, in his autobiography, termed courage as the most important of all the attributes of a successful goalkeeper. In those days of unprotected goalies, Laxman was indeed courage personified. Playing with just pads as a protective gear, Laxman had nerves of steel and his gallantry was next to none. Charles Cornelius, former Indian hockey player, once quoted about Laxman:

‘Laxman was among the game’s greatest. He was an epitome of courage and a role-model for others of his ilk. Unfazed by any situation, he had the ability to defuse any crisis. His team-mates were at a loss to know how his pads grew broader and broader as the contest wore on.’

In a country where ex-sportsmen, apart from probably cricketers, are hardly looked after by their respective federations, Shankar Laxman lived the final years of his life in penury, and died at the age of 73 after suffering from gangrene in one leg in his native town Mhow.

he former Indian hockey player Charles Cornelius had once said of him " Lakshman was among the game`s greatest. He was an epitome of courage and a role model for others of his ilk. Unfazed by any situation, Shankar Lakshman had the ability to defuse any crisis. His team-mates were at a loss to know how his pads grew broader and broader as the contest wore on." Shankar Lakshman, an Indian hockey player was born on 7th July in the year 1933.

The Indian National team which had played in the Olympics in the year 1956, 1960 and 1964, Shankar Lakshman has served as the goalkeeper for the Indian team. In the Olympics, the Indian National Team won two gold medals and one silver medal. Under his captaincy, the Indian team also won the gold in the 1966 Asian Games.

He played hockey at a time when as a protective gear, the goalkeeper were provided only the pads. The Rock of Gibraltar, as his opponents called him, the manager of the silver medal winning Pakistani hockey team of the `64 Tokyo Olympics quoted that `Shankar Lakshman was the sole obstacle between the Pakistani team and the gold medal`. He was the first goalkeeper captain in the world. In the 1964 Hockey finals against Pakistan while referring to his performance in Tokyo the Australian Hockey magazine Hockey Circle had said, "...for Lakshman, the ball was the size of a football. It was his afternoon of glory and fame. "

Sports career of Shankar Lakshman had begun as a footballer. This former captain of the football team of Kodaria village in Mhow, switched over to hockey only after he joined the Army. To disseminate hockey, Heroes Club had been founded by him in Mhow. Mhow`s best football club, Young Brothers also benefited from his expertise. Under his guidance as coach Indian National Hockey team participated to the Barcelona Olympics of 1992. Manohar Singh, son of Shankar Lakshman was also a hockey player and had played for Indore Christian College and the University of Indore (as Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya was known earlier). But his grandsons have taken another famous sport of Mhow that is wrestling.

At the tender age of 14, as a bandsman, Lakshman had joined the Indian Army in the year 1947. He also served in the 5th Battalion of Maratha Light Infantry. In the year1978, he had adjourned from the Army. At that time he was serving the post of a Subedar Major. He was awarded the rank of honorary captain during his tenure as army man.. This battalion, with full military honours conducted his funeral. By the Infantry School, Garrison Ground Mhow has been commuted into a mini stadium and has been named after Lakshman. The Infantry School Mhow has also established the Shankar Lakshman Hockey Championship Trophy that can be considered as an apt honour for a son of Mhow. The 26th Maratha Light Infantry won this trophy for the first time.

He belonged to Mhow, a small cantonment town in the Indore District of the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh state, India. He pertained the Shekhawat community of Rajasthan. This eminent Indian field hockey player, Shankar Lakshman spent all his retired life there until his death in 2006. He died on the 29th April, 2006. The people of Mhow were aghast to learn a month before his death that he was suffering from gangrene in one leg. Doctors suggested surgical removal of the portion being affected. But the Lakshman family refused and preferred for alternative therapy. They went to the former cricketer and a healer who uses traditional herbal remedies, he was going to Ramesh Parmar. The people of this small town who were very proud of him also loved Shankar Lakshman so dearly. He was and will always remain, for them, one of the few genuine heroes that their small town has produced. He was awarded the Arjuna Award in 1965 and the Padmashri in 1967.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Much earlier the Rajasthan Patrika had stopped publishing my column. The owner, R.C. Kulish, was a personal friend but could not tolerate my criticism of the BJP position. ‘I am not against Muslims and I have one servant from the community but they have to be kept in their place,’ he told me once. Never did I suspect that he would go so far as to stop the publication of the column. I vainly tried to meet him in Jaipur. Once when in the city, I learnt he was critically ill, so I went to his house and waited to see him but he refused to meet me.

In the case of Dainik Bhaskar, I stopped my columns because it refused to publish my piece on ‘paid news’. Although I did not name anyone the newspaper still refused to publish the column. I wrote a letter of protest to the owner and received no response.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Recently outlook ran this story detailing famous murder cases of yesteryears and alongside usual suspect of post freedom nanawati case there were few pre independence and one amongst them was this murder trial involving maharajah of Indore , a natch girl and it finally led to his ouster....

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Y! Editor’s note: Anil Joshi, an Ayurveda doctor in Fatehgarh village in Madhya Pradesh- collected one rupee each from one lakh people and constructed a check dam across a local seasonal river called Somli. Going on to repeat it across eleven locations, he is now a full-time water conservationist. With a dream to build 100 such check dams in nearby villages, constantly experiencing drought conditions.One premise of the green economy (World Environment Day 2012 theme) is social inclusion and here is an economically inventive version of that possibility, where the initiative remains human.

The story of Re 1 and a dam ‘doctor’

In Fatehgarh, a check dam, constructed in 2010, permanently altered the face of this village – from a drought stricken - a well-irrigated one. And in that little dash sits this unsung story.

Anil Joshi, (39) with wife and two daughters. He went on to sell his wife’s jewellery? Why? Read on.Anil Joshi had a clinic here since 1994 and knew most of the gaonwallahs. “Some of my patients were farmers who obtained 100-200 quintals of food grain during harvesting season but after eight years of meager rains, they were in a very bad situation and had to buy food grain to feed their family,” says 39-year-old Joshi. The situation was so bad that patients couldn’t pay his fee either.

As a resident of Mandsaur, (the district HQ) Joshi has seen better days when rains were sufficient and farmers harvested enough to sustain their families. Things had taken a turn for the worse after 1999 as rainfall began to decrease.In 2008, the village faced its worst drought and water scarcity.
Joshi felt building a check dam across the river Somli would help the villagers, as it would raise the ground water table in the area. However, when he shared the idea with his farmer friends they just laughed it off. But Joshi borrowed about a thousand empty cement sacks from a friend and filled them with sand. He himself stood in the middle of the Somli river with a rope tied around his waist and his friends held the rope on either ends. “Though the river was dry, there was always a stretch where water flowed with a strong current. As I stood in the running water, I could gauge its force and realized what a challenging task I had in my hand. The barrier that we planned to put up across the river had to withstand the force of the water,” he recalls. With the help of a few friends, Joshi put all the sand filled sacks across the river in a row. Within fifteen days, it rained and there was water in the check dam. Meanwhile the hand pumps sputtered a memorable gurgle.

“There was a good crop that year after years of drought,” remembers Joshi.

Joshi's check dams effort and evidence of a raised water table.Recharged at many levels, what does Joshi do next? Remember the earlier photo. He sells his wife’s jewels and borrows some money to construct another check dam on the Somli river. “Even today when I get involved in the house we are constructing, she motivates me to go and build check dams instead and not worry about our house,” Joshi’s voice beaming with pride.

In 2010 Joshi hits upon the idea of taking one rupee from each villager for constructing a permanent check dam across the Somli river. He felt such a dam would permanently end the drought situation of the village. Joshi was able to collect Rs 36 in just three hours on day 1. The next day’s collection was Rs 120. However, some people began to question him on his motive - collecting money, why? But positive press coverage played a role here. “After the media wrote about the check dams I had built, more people started to support me,” says Joshi. Two teachers, Sundarlal Prajapat and Omprakash Mehta, extended their support in a big way.

Joshi and his dedicated team collected 1 lakh in three months flat and a permanent check dam was built at a cost of Rs 92000. The villagers voluntarily provided their labor.Following the success at Fatehgarh, Joshi has helped to build eleven more check dams on rivers and ‘nullahs’ (smaller channels of water) in eleven villages within a 10 km radius of Fatehgarh.He now aims to plant trees along the 120 km road to Sawaliya Dham to provide shade for the barefoot pilgrims visiting the Krishna temple there.
And build 100 check dams within a few years. “Constructing check dams by collecting one rupee from each person in a drought stricken village has now become my mission and I will make this effort a continuous process,” says Joshi, who is now becoming known more as a water conservationist and less as a medical practitioner.